This disclosure relates to a system for automatically printing documents that are stored on a portable memory device with little or no user activation of a local user interface (LUI), other than to connect the portable memory device to a printer.
In performing a conventional print job in a document system or a multi-function peripheral (MFP), such as sending a file to the printer via a network or plugging in a universal serial bus (USB) drive to a printer, a user normally needs to perform several steps. For example, in a conventional print job in a networked environment, the user needs to send a print job from a computer and walk to the printer to retrieve the printed document. In another example, the user plugs into the printer a USB or other media card that stores documents to be printed. The user needs to use the LUI to browse the file directory on the USB card and select the files to be printed.
There are other scenarios when a print job fails to complete for various reasons, such as machine error or low resource condition, in which the user often has to switch to another device and reconfigure the job manually to print only remaining document pages, or to allow the system to automatically re-print the entire document which duplicates what has already been printed. Existing systems, including those that can print document files from a USB drive, may not have the capability of identifying an incomplete print job from the system itself or from another system and automatically resuming the remaining portion of the print job.
This document describes a system that may address at least some of the issues described above.